Precise localization and characterization of rudimentary shapes with neural networks
I think you're describing "object localization and detection" which combines object identification with discovery of its spatial placement in the field of view.  There's been a lot of work on this in the past 5 years using CNNs and variants.  It's very much in demand for pedestrian/obstruction detection, identification, and avoidance in autonomous car systems.

Here's a place to start:  https://github.com/kjw0612/awesome-deep-vision

Especially, take a look at "Faster R-CNN" by Ren et al, 2016.